Curricula comparison of health and social management programs in Czech Republic, Finland, Portugal and Scotland

Abstract

Managing social and health care services places higher and higher demands on managers. Nowadays managers have to find ways how to deliver high quality services with less available resources. Clients’needs have become very complex and therefore they must be guaranteed to have an access to both social and health care services. Managers in order to provide quality services also need to be multidiscipline professionals. Usually they need to have an academic degree in a public health discipline and/or in social work. On the other hand they must be also well trained managers, who are able in turbulent times to lead multidisciplinary teams of experts to deliver excellent outcomes. No wonder that the universities are asked to design special programmes in which 21st century social and health care managers could be trained. So far many of such programmes have been developed especially at national levels. Current experiences show that the national borders have to be overcome even in the area of new curricula development. The aim of this paper is present how five European universities started work on Joint Master Degree programme in social and health care management. In order to achieve such a goal they needed to analyse the content of their curricula to define their similarities and to be aware of their differences. The comparison was made by curricula, usually programme’s and modules’ description, analysis accompanied by online interviews. This article presents the main findings of the curricula comparison. The main objective of a curriculum development it’s to address and answer to the societal needs and aims and to the results of the analysis do it by academics and professional about the competencies needed in future. Share and build a curriculum between different Universities, with different background, experiences, interested, core competencies, culture, and way to do the “things” is a challenge and demands a carefully methodology design, in order to prevent a remission in curriculum coherence. The idea to develop a curriculum in Health Care Administration at European level requires a strong commitment with knowledge and the idea of a common European framework of curriculum design. To answer to this we need work on a curriculum comparison methodology, in same way defining a benchmark analysis of curriculum that is used at National level. The involved programmes share many similarities in their general set ups. This finding can be documented mainly on the absolvents’ profiles and learning outcomes’ statements. Three main thematic areas can be identified in each involved programme. These areas are: health and/or social care systems, social research and management. On the other hand in Bologna declaration regulated environment surprisingly many differences have been discovered too. Different programme’s documentation, length, credit values, modules’ amount belong among the most important ones. The curriculum comparison has shown there is a good base for creation of Joint Master Degree programme in health and social care management if a careful attention is paid mainly to different national approaches to Joint Master Degree programme accreditation, each programme concrete ways of deliver and the proper choice of suitable technology for international collaborative learning.